Critical Essay by Stanley Kauffmann

Sam Shepard is phenomenal. He is the best practicing American playwright, I think, now that Tennessee Williams is doodling….

Curse of the Starving Class … is another of Shepard's heartbreakers—it contains so much, yet it finally comes to not enough…. [It] deals with California sheep raisers and thus immediately strikes a distinctive Shepard note. He often deals with non-urban people, often in the West; most of our playwrights are urban in setting and feeling….

Shepard stokes a simmering heat under the whole play, even under the punchy comic sections, a ruthlessness, a kind of anger that makes the essential drama seem to be not in the story but between the writer himself and the world. Once again a Shepard play testifies to the fact that he is a true man of the theater: he doesn't...